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Will Tubine make a MAC version of LOTRO?
Dzarky
Member UncommonPosts: 10
Does anyone know if Turbine is planning on making a MAC version of LOTRO?
Comments
CURRENTLY PLAYING SHAIYA
There *should* be, yes, but the T3 engine is so entrenched in low-level DirectX I don't see Turbine making the effort to get it on Mac or any other platform. WINE/Cedega can't deal with it on Linux either.
Since that is the case, I doubt they will work on a mac version since macs pretty much assimilated and now emulate windows pretty smoothly (Note the relative term heh).
Mac's suck at playing games, its a fact of life.
it is very very hard for developers to make a game Mac friendly
it is almost always not economically viable to produce a Mac version
there are many programs out there that allow a Mac to run some PC games (boot something...cant remember the rest of the name)
MMO wish list:
-Changeable worlds
-Solid non level based game
-Sharks with lasers attached to their heads
And lastly.. There are not "many" programs out there to allow a Mac to play PC games. There is 1. Its called BootCamp. And it isn't to "allow" a Mac to run PC games, its to criple a Mac to become a PC if we choose. It Boots windows XP in 3.5 seconds and never locks up or crashes that I've seen. Serioulsy, don't fall into the marketing hype that is drilled into your young muchy brains. PC's won because of marketing only. Not because its better. My Quad core, 6 Gig Ram, ATI Radeon x1900 XT 512MB GDDR3, Liquid Cooled Mac can smoke any PC i've ever sat in front of at anything.
And lastly.. There are not "many" programs out there to allow a Mac to play PC games. There is 1. Its called BootCamp. And it isn't to "allow" a Mac to run PC games, its to criple a Mac to become a PC if we choose. It Boots windows XP in 3.5 seconds and never locks up or crashes that I've seen. Serioulsy, don't fall into the marketing hype that is drilled into your young muchy brains. PC's won because of marketing only. Not because its better. My Quad core, 6 Gig Ram, ATI Radeon x1900 XT 512MB GDDR3, Liquid Cooled Mac can smoke any PC i've ever sat in front of at anything.
Owned. And I agree. I run ALL of my games on a macbook pro and it runs games better than most PCs that people on these forums build. I play LOTRO on the highest settings as well eq2. I can run vanguard on medium to high settings with no problem and a lot of people on here can barely run on medium with their "uber machines".
playing: darkfall
waiting: earthrise
As long as you don't mind being without the right click button, use boot camp.. Or just buy a PC!
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Mighty Mouse has 2 buttons, plus you can use just about any USB mouse on a Mac. I've used both a Mighty Mouse and a Logitech G5 on my Mac for years now. Or if you need windows for some god aweful reason, use Boot Camp or Parallels and install Windows on the Mac. That way when you want to use a solid OS for work, rather gaming you can do so.
Second, current generation of macs are running on stock more or less stock PC hardware , so it's just a question on loading up xp and play whatever pc title ones heart desires. So business wise porting LOTRO to mac makes very little sense for the time being.
Just to make this clear, I run two macs at home, both core2duo with x1600 gpu. One is an iMac and the other a Macbook Pro. I am a WoW player, for the past 8 months or so, and both computers run WoW really well at the highest resolution with all graphics settings on full. I also dual boot the iMac in to XP from time to time to play games like C&C3, which can also be played at full resolution and quality settings. The only trouble with booting in to XP to play an MMO game is that I lose the ability to run my other apps while playing. Generally while playing WoW I have a few other apps running, browser, im, itunes etc that I access while travelling or otherwise waiting in the game. In windows I would not be happy doing this. If the most successful MMO can release a mac version simultaneously then surely one aiming to be as big or bigger should do the same. I was excited at the thought of being able to play the LOTRO game, but I am not willing to reboot and lose all the other functionality of my system for it. Maybe Turbine can use Cider to make the porting easier.
Sure, you can emulate windows on a mac just fine. But then you might as well save a few £100 and buy a PC, which has the architecture the games are origionaly designed for
Really there isn't much point in spending money on a Mac now, their only real advantage is they look pretty.
92% of all computers Windows
4% of all computers Mac
3% of all computers Linux
the other 1% misc. other
So, when a company crunches the numbers it just doesn't make sense. For better or worse, companies produce games to make money. The most money is made in the Windows market. Not saying it's the better platform, but reality is what it is.
If you dispute the %'s above feel free to prove them wrong. It's not as easy as you might think to come up with definitive numbers, but being in the computer industry for 20+ years now - I'll stick to my numbers. If you've got a Gartner or IDC report showing other numbers I'd love to see the link.
This article will show you a pretty good idea of where Mac is in total world-wide numbers:
www.appleinsider.com/articles/06/10/18/apples_share_of_us_pc_market_jumps_to_61_percent.html
Actually the same disk that installs WoW on a PC will install it on a Mac running OS X, no need to make the Mac run Windows. I stopped paying WoW before the Intell based Macs came out, so I can't say if it runs BETTER under OS X or Windows running on Mac hardware but Blizzard has almost always made their games for Macs as well as PCs. Which kinda shows the whole "not worth making it for Macs" thing doesn't hold water.
Mac owners LOVE games and will buy ANY good game made for a Mac, the won't buy some poorly done crappy port-to-mac-four-years-later game. Macs owners don't make up a huge share of the desktop market, but hey , they have money to spend and are a captive audiance for a good game. Make a PC game and you have to compete with 100s of current titles. Make a Mac Game and you compete with probably less than 10, and you only have to build it for specific hardware so the issue of video and sound drivers that screws up so many games is gone.
Yes, there are 1000's of games published for Windows, most of them suck.
Actually the same disk that installs WoW on a PC will install it on a Mac running OS X, no need to make the Mac run Windows. I stopped paying WoW before the Intell based Macs came out, so I can't say if it runs BETTER under OS X or Windows running on Mac hardware but Blizzard has almost always made their games for Macs as well as PCs. Which kinda shows the whole "not worth making it for Macs" thing doesn't hold water.
Mac owners LOVE games and will buy ANY good game made for a Mac, the won't buy some poorly done crappy port-to-mac-four-years-later game. Macs owners don't make up a huge share of the desktop market, but hey , they have money to spend and are a captive audiance for a good game. Make a PC game and you have to compete with 100s of current titles. Make a Mac Game and you compete with probably less than 10, and you only have to build it for specific hardware so the issue of video and sound drivers that screws up so many games is gone.
Yes, there are 1000's of games published for Windows, most of them suck.
Umm... you do realize that because one company (Blizzard) makes their games both PC and MAC it doesn't nullify the debate that it's not worth it for other companies to do the same, right?If making games for MAC's was such a sure-fire money making proposal then why don't more companies do it? You do realize that companies spend a lot of money doing research to find out what kinds of markets they think will make them the most money, right?
You say that MAC owners "LOVE" games. Really? Well, you do, and there are definitely others that do as well, but on a percentage basis - not really. A smaller percentage of your average MAC user buys games vs. your average PC user.
That coupled with a huge difference in the installed base to begin with = very small sales for MAC games. Why do you think that Blizzard moved to the combined box? Didn't you notice that even Blizzard now combines the MAC title version in with the PC version? Either on the same CD/DVD or as a seperate CD/DVD, but still packaged in the same box.
Doesn't that tell you something? If you've been gaming on the MAC for any significant amount of time I'm sure you will remember the days when the MAC gaming software got it's own box. Not anymore though - they get to share the box with the PC software. Smart move on the game publishers part. You're going to have a hard time convincing us though, that it wasn't done for the simple reason that putting MAC software in it's own box wasn't worth the cost of the packaging.
As a MAC gamer you do have at least one significant advantage over PC gamers. MAC users get to rely on all the PC gamers to weed out the trash for them. The reason you hardly ever see anything except great MAC games is because they were best-sellers for the PC first (except Blizzard again of course - as they usually release simultaneously). So, being a MAC gamer does have it's perks - you get to use all the PC gamers as beta-testers.
UH.. Mac's do not "suck at playing games". Only PC advantage has always been availability of games. Making a game Mac friendly? This is not a PC to Console porting situation. You don't make something Mac friendly.. You either make it for Mac or you don't. Its actually extremely easier to to make a game on a Mac then a PC from a programming point of view. There is no hardware advantage to PC's. Actually Mac has the better built hardware. A windows "ported" game would run 100 times better on a Mac if if did not have all the PC trash left behind in its code.And lastly.. There are not "many" programs out there to allow a Mac to play PC games. There is 1. Its called BootCamp. And it isn't to "allow" a Mac to run PC games, its to criple a Mac to become a PC if we choose. It Boots windows XP in 3.5 seconds and never locks up or crashes that I've seen. Serioulsy, don't fall into the marketing hype that is drilled into your young muchy brains. PC's won because of marketing only. Not because its better. My Quad core, 6 Gig Ram, ATI Radeon x1900 XT 512MB GDDR3, Liquid Cooled Mac can smoke any PC i've ever sat in front of at anything.
Ok, here is where the big disconnect happens.
People are trying to compare OSes and Hardware and mixing up the concepts too easily.
#1) Mac 'hardware' does not suck at games. The problem is that PC people don't think in terms of 'hardware' when they think of Macs and Mac people DO think in terms of hardware. With regard to hardware Macs today are JUST LIKE PCs. As for you 'uber' system, it is not uber because it has an Apple logo on it, or that it is a 'Mac' brand, it is uber because of the hardware in it. With that said, this SAME hardware is in use in PCs and PCs actually get the use of 'uber' hardware far before it is available on Macs. So yes your system is uber, but it is NOT ABOVE PCs, it is just uber hardware and PC users can buy the same hardware without the Mac Logo, and usually cheaper and several months if not years before Apple makes it available. (Example here is look at the notebook market, PC users have had 1920x1200 displays for several years on notebooks with HIGH END gaming cards in the notebooks, and Mac's notebooks are still very middle of the line for features and performance even though they are 'exactly' the same class of hardware that PCs use today.)
#2) Mac 'software' DOES suck at games, notably the OS of Mac System 10 or OS X. The same Mac hardware booted into Windows via bootcamp will run games faster than Games running inside OS X, and yes I am talking about native OS X Intel based games. There are several reasons for this, but the most notable is the double buffering that OS X uses and its poor user to kernel mode driver implementation that OpenGL has to deal with. OpenGL can be almost as fast as DirectX, but on OS X it has to push through the Apple side of things with regard to the video driver model and here is where it suffers. Also running games in a Window on OS X reduces their performance where on a Winows based PC a game in a Window or Full Screen mode are equally the same in terms of performance assuming the GPU has enough VRAM.
So the real debate here is 'what OS technology' is the fastest for games. WIndows is designed for gaming more than OS X and probably will always have a gaming performance lead because of its attention to getting the most performance out of the hardware being used. The MS XBox 360 team are great examples of engineers taking gaming technology and bringing it back to MS and the WIndows division for use in Windows, they also have been the leader in designing the next generation GPU technologies, hence why the basic architecture of the upcoming DX10 cards from ATI and NVidia use a series of unified shader concepts that were first used in the XBox 360 over two years ago.